From jcowan@reutershealth.com Wed May 30 07:45:02 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: jcowan@reutershealth.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_1_3); 30 May 2001 14:45:02 -0000 Received: (qmail 89147 invoked from network); 30 May 2001 14:43:56 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l10.egroups.com with QMQP; 30 May 2001 14:43:56 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail.reutershealth.com) (204.243.9.36) by mta2 with SMTP; 30 May 2001 14:43:56 -0000 Received: from reutershealth.com (IDENT:cowan@[192.168.3.11]) by mail.reutershealth.com (Pro-8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA16986; Wed, 30 May 2001 10:47:30 -0400 (EDT) X-Mozilla-Status: 0801 Message-ID: <3B13AD35.8080204@reutershealth.com> Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 10:07:49 -0400 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.4.2-2 i686; en-US; rv:0.9) Gecko/20010505 X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Nick Nicholas Cc: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Request for grammar clarifications References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: John Cowan Nick Nicholas wrote: > Is {lo ninmu du la djiotis.} an erroneous statement? Not stylistically > undesirable, but demonstrably illogical or false? No, certainly not, given that "la djiotis. ninmu" holds. It means that there is some woman who is identical with (= the same object as) Djiotis. > Is the fact that du is > intended to render as equal *names* of a thing, rather than just > descriptions, sufficient to do so? Not at all. Indeed, using "du" between names is a rather marginal use, as in "Cicero is Tully". The more reasonable uses are things like "Fred is the man who mows the lawn" and "The man I saw at the beach is the spy who was arrested last week" (Take that, Ortcutt!), where we relate a name to an in-mind description. Using a veridical description instead is certainly both grammatical and reasonable, as in "ro cevni du la .alax." = "Every god is identical with Allah". > In a related sense, can you legitimately > say {la ranjit. no'u lo pendo be la djiotis.}? This, after all, is the same > as {la ranjit. noi du lo pendo be la djiotis.} Yes, you can legitimately say that. > 3) me > > Can you say {le vi karce cu me la ford.}? Do brand names become names for > the wares themselves? I think that is a rather strange usage: "a Ford" is clearly not a proper-name use of "Ford". I would say "me la ford. karce". > 4) ke'a > > I'm only doing it for paedagogical reasons, but is there any reason {le mi > mensi poi ri nelci la rikis.martin.} can't mean exactly the same as {le mi > mensi poi ke'a nelci la rikis.martin.}? Technically, "ri" refers to the last *complete* sumti, and in "le mi mensi poi broda" the description is not yet complete. -- There is / one art || John Cowan no more / no less || http://www.reutershealth.com to do / all things || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan with art- / lessness \\ -- Piet Hein